For my part, here are three two basic recommendations that I’d like to toss out—more as questions and points of discussion than actual fleshed-out solutions, mind you. (I was going to propose three recommendations, but this post is getting a bit long-winded already. It’s the academic in me…)

Recommendation 1: Create opportunities for students to fail—in a good way. As just about any educator will tell you, students are obsessed with grades (hey, I was too at their age). This, of course, can make it hard to help students see the vision of working and struggling for the sake of learning rather than merely meeting requirements for points. I’m sure I speak for a few professors when I say that I’d like to get away from grades entirely and find some other, better method of evaluation, but generally we’re stuck with the system we have. And, as much as we bemoan grades, the academic system does nothing to deter students from being super grade-conscious (by virtue of the way scholarships work, etc.).

The upshot, I believe, is that all of this creates a culture of perfectionism and conformity that might lead to good grades but doesn’t contribute to an ethos of energy, innovation, and risk-taking—i.e., the stuff of tech startups that we need to be encouraging in higher education and in journalism education in particular. This is a long way of saying that we (educators) can do more to give students a “license to fail,” in the most positive sense—an opportunity to think big, play with stuff, and learn by failing along the way. We could think of this as colleges encouraging students to carve out 20% of their academic time to experiment, a la Google employees.

OK, nice. So how do we do this? Well, as I said, it would be hard to work against the structure of grading in general. But if we think about the student newspaper as the place where journalism students used to (and continue to) “fail” on a regular basis, then maybe we can start imagining opportunities to create similar (but more broadly-focused) extracurricular “centers” of some kind—say, coffeehouse-style places, physical spaces, where students can congregate and collaborate on crazy projects. But we wouldn’t want to limit this just to journalism students (for, as C.W. Anderson reminds us, “j-school is too important to be left to journalists“) … which brings me to …

Recommendation 2: Build partnerships within and beyond the university. First, there are good reasons for journalism programs to build stronger partnerships with local media organizations—not for exploiting student labor, but for creating a more realistic experience for students and a richer media offering for the community. The Times-NYU partnership is a great example of this. But I’ll focus on the first part of my recommendation: Journalism programs should be wasting no time trying to forge connections with other departments and academic centers around campus. Yes, this happens to some extent, but not deeply enough. Begin with the low-hanging fruit: Journalism has, um, a little revenue problem on its hands, so why not look to the business school for some brainstorming? And I’m not suggesting another bureaucratic apparatus, some center with an eight-word name and little to show for it; rather, I’m envisioning a scenario in which administrators from both programs come together and create those formalized spaces—think of them like “network forums,” in the framework developed by Fred Turner and touched on in my dissertation—wheres faculty and students from across the divide can congregate, share ideas, and see what emerges from the mix, the organic fashion of a (business) hackathon. Such melding is “where good ideas come from“—the very stuff of innovation. Some (like Jeff Jarvis and his program at CUNY) are making big strides in this area of entrepreneurship. But we need more, and soon.

Another obvious point of connection is journalism and computer science. Again, some are nicely moving into this space (like Columbia) and others have been working at this for a while (like Rich Gordon), but we need more action, and soon. J-schools shouldn’t try to teach programming any more than programmers should try to teach journalism, but certainly there’s some sorely needed cross-polination: things they can teach us, and things we can teach them.

On that note, I’ll end with a little story. In my honors Introduction to Mass Communication course I have a lot of students from around the University of Minnesota. During introductions on Day 1 yesterday, one student said he’s a computer science major.

“Are you interested in journalism?” I asked.

He shot back a no-duh look.

“Of course. Why do you think I’m here?”

I think we’d find that a surprising number of computer science folks (and others, for that matter) have an interest in journalism, even just contributing to its development in some small way. Why? For some of the same reasons we got into this: for its noble calling, its idealistic vision, its civic purpose. They’re interested. We’ve just got to reach out and invite them over to play. Even if we fail a little along the way.